umang: UMANG app to get Siri, Alexa rival to deliver PAN, PF and other government services with voice commands – Times of India

The government’s umbrealla or master platform for a wide range of services — UMANG or Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance — is soon set to get voice support. Queries made to the Umang app will soon be answered via voice-based commands. This means that just like Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri, the Umang app too will respond to users queries. “Ask UMANG voice Chatbot is coming soon on UMANG Website http://umang.gov.in which will give users both chat and voice enabled search options,” says the tweet from UMANG app’s official handle.

Bengaluru-based Senseforth AI Research Pvt Ltd has reportedly been chosen to enable the functionality for over 100 services on the platform. The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) officials told Economic Times (ET) that the company was picked after it emerged as the lowest bidder for the contract. Senseforth AI will deploy voice and chatbots in English and Hindi on Umang over the next three months. This means that initially the answers will be available in Hindi and English languages. The government plans to add other languages including Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu in the coming months.
As for the services, the popular services such as EPFO, blood bank, passport, PAN card and driving licence are said to have been shortlisted for now.
For those unware, a Digital India initiative of MeitY it offers citizens multiple government services through UMANG mobile app, website, SMS short code, and UMANG toll free IVR. Presently, UMANG supports 12 major Indian languages in addition to English. These include Bengali, Hindi, Assamese, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Sanskrit, Nepali, Manipuri, Maithili, Sindhi, Santhali, Konkani, Kashmiri, Dogri and Bodo